Chapter 21
delves into animation.
Most WPF developers use a combination of techniques, laying out some of their user interface with a
design tool (Visual Studio or Expression Blend) and then fine-tuning it by editing the XAML markup by hand.
However, you??™ll probably find that it??™s easiest to write all your XAML by hand until you learn about layout containers
in Chapter 4. That??™s because you need to use a layout container to properly arrange multiple controls
in a window.
Understanding XAML
Developers realized long ago that the most efficient way to tackle complex, graphically rich
applications is to separate the graphical portion from the underlying code. That way, artists
can own the graphics and developers can own the code. Both pieces can be designed and
refined separately, without any versioning headaches.
Graphical User Interfaces Before WPF
With traditional display technologies, there??™s no easy way to separate the graphical content
from the code. The key problem with Windows Forms application is that every form you create
is defined entirely in VB code. As you drop controls onto the design surface and configure
them, Visual Studio quietly adjusts the code in the corresponding form class. Sadly, graphic
designers don??™t have any tools that can work with VB code.
CHAPTER 2 n XAML 24
Instead, artists are forced to take their content and export it to a bitmap format.
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